Drug WarRant

[Move breakables away from the computer now.]

Cliff Kincaid. That’s all most people need to hear to know that they’re about to get a real load of crap. And boy, oh boy, does this man know how to give you top shelf crap.

I’m not even going to take it apart. It’s beyond….

Was the Pentagon Shooter an Obama-approved Pothead? by Cliff Kincaid at Right Side News.

The left says he was a right-winger; the conservatives say that he was a leftist. What is abundantly clear, from reading his Internet commentaries, is that Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell was a psychotic pothead. […]

But rather than try and make silly ideological points by accusing Bedell of being either left or right, there is an urgent need for the blogosphere-and the major media-to address the question of how he became criminally psychotic and a patsy for conspiracy theories. The answer is marijuana, which alters the ability of the mind to comprehend reality but which is depicted by most of the media as safe and harmless.

This connection-between pot and mental illness-is a matter of the medical record but is conveniently being ignored in the many stories about this young man’s strange journey and tragic end. […]

The public laughs at the old propaganda films such as “Reefer Madness,” which depict marijuana smokers as crazed zombies. However, the Pentagon rampage was likely triggered by marijuana-induced psychosis. Bedell was not only a heavy marijuana user and had been busted for possession and growing the drug, but dedicated much of his life to glorifying the substance. […]

The “Medical Marijuana” Scam

The rampage at the Pentagon has also raised disturbing questions about the Obama Administration’s policy of allowing “medical marijuana” dispensaries in such places as California, where Bedell was living, to operate free from fear of federal prosecution. President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder have been accused of encouraging marijuana use by refusing to use federal resources to prosecute “medical marijuana” users and the “dispensaries” which supply them with the illegal dope. […]

One can hope that the tragic story of John Patrick Bedell and his victims will cause our major media to review the dangerous implications of allowing more and more people access to the drug, on the spurious grounds that it is somehow medicinal, and start a much-needed examination of the billionaires and organizations pushing drug legalization in America.

Billionaire George Soros has been called “an extremely evil person” by Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation for putting millions of dollars into groups like the Drug Policy Alliance dedicated to legalization of pot and other drugs. […]

Although drug legalization has been mostly a left-wing cause, funded by “progressive” billionaires such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, the libertarian Cato Institute has been promoting legalization of dope for many years. It, too, has been funded by Soros. […]

Rather than publicize the marijuana-psychosis connection, the major media have shied away from it, probably because some journalists use pot themselves as a “recreational” drug. […]

[Joyce] Nalepka noted that, during the meeting with senior Department of Justice staff, the group of anti-drug activists was told that the federal government did not have the resources to go after the problem of “medical marijuana.”

Nalepka countered, “That’s why we’re here-we want the government to get the resources. It is well-known that marijuana is both physically and psychologically addictive and is a definite stepping stone to many drugs.”

She concluded, “Allowing this to continue is treason, i.e., a betrayal of trust, against our own children and grandchildren.”

Fortunately, Cliff Kincaid is himself considered to be a raving lunatic by virtually all of the population that doesn’t rely on forwarded emails as their only source of news.

Kincaid’s biggest fear is that someone will tell his readers the web address of snopes.com.

Cliff is part of my Who’s Who in Drug Prohibition page.

In Defense of Willie Nelson

Willie and Family now have an unlikely new champion: State Sen. Charlie Albertson, who just cut a song defending the outlaw singer. […]

The song, called “Leave the Man Alone,” refers to the Jan. 28 citations issued to six members of Nelson’s band on either possession of marijuana or possession of non-tax-paid alcohol. The band’s bus was outside the Duplin County Events Center in Kenansville.

Not bad. But here’s my favorite song written about Willie:
I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again – Celebrity bloopers here

What passes for journalism…

The gunman who charged into the Pentagon Thursday and opened fire was intelligent but troubled, and had struggled with a longtime marijuana addiction, a family friend said today.

Letter-writer extraordinaire Robert Sharpe:

For non-violent offenders with chronic substance abuse problems, drug treatment is a cost-effective alternative to incarceration. Unfortunately, drug courts are being misused for political purposes. Record numbers of citizens arrested for marijuana possession have been forced into treatment by the criminal justice system. The resulting distortion of treatment statistics is used by shameless drug warriors to claim that marijuana is “addictive.”

Zero-tolerance drug laws do not distinguish between occasional use and chronic abuse. The coercion of Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis into taxpayer-funded treatment centers says a lot about government priorities, but absolutely nothing about the relative harms of marijuana. For an objective take on marijuana, look to Canada.

After months of research, the Canadian Senate concluded in 2002 that marijuana is relatively harmless, marijuana prohibition contributes to organized crime, and law enforcement efforts have little impact on patterns of use. In the words of Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, “Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue.”

Students debate drug policy — it was The Libertarians, College Democrats, College Republicans and College Socialists.

I loved this part.

The students also debated the merits of medical marijuana use. The Republicans were the only students opposed to using it for medical purposes.

Instead, they suggested harnessing substances in marijuana used for medical reasons to eliminate the negative effects of smoking.

The other debaters fired back, defending their stance in favor of medical marijuana.

“The Republicans keep stressing a safe way to harness the [medical substances] — it’s called a vaporizer,” said Socialist Paige Heimark (freshman-history and psychology).

Sanitizing history

How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson’s crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.

When this AP story came out, it pissed me off for the same reason, but I didn’t get around to writing about it. Scott Morgan took care of it, instead. How Can We Stop Drug Gangs From Growing Pot in the Woods? Legalize Pot

This Associated Press report is over 1,200 words long, yet does not contain one single idea for addressing the problem. Not even a stupid hopeless drug war idea like “we need more funding for eradication,” or “we need to get everyone to stop using marijuana.” Apparently, the AP is simply content to point out to us that our most precious natural resources are being slowly destroyed by Mexican marijuana cartels and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it.

But, of course there is.

DrugSense Weekly – a weekly review of the most interesting or relevant articles in the press and on the web related to drug policy reform.

Drug War Chronicle – weekly update of drug war news and analysis from Stop the Drug War.org.

…. consider this an Open Thread

In case you don’t read Radley Balko on a regular basis… which you should.

The Baltimore Sun reported on the use of SWAT in Maryland.

Heavily armed tactical police in Prince George’s County raid more homes than any other law enforcement agency in the state, according to newly released data from the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention.

In the last six months of 2009, police there conducted 195 tactical entries, 105 involving crime deemed nonserious felonies and misdemeanors. That’s compared with 84 such raids in Baltimore

This was the subject of Radley’s crime column this week: 4.5 SWAT Raids Per Day: Maryland’s SWAT transparency bill produces its first disturbing results

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war. […]

Lawmakers in other states should take notice. It’s time to have a national discussion on the wisdom of sending phalanxes of cops dressed like soldiers into private homes in search of nonviolent and consensual crimes.

The Baltimore Sun article also led to this:

Ex-Cop Chides Calvo for Questioning the Cops Who Nearly Killed Him

This is an excellent take-down by Radley of a real jerk who had an LTE in the Baltimore Sun this week. This ex-cop attempts to justify all the excess SWAT use and thinks that Cheye Calvo should support it!

Great bit at the end with Radley responding to the ex-cop:

Perhaps if Mayor Calvo had ever had to face such danger he would understand.

Schweinsburg saves his most callous, oblivious comment for last. Calvo has faced such danger. He faced it when a bunch of armed idiots stormed his house and indiscriminately fired off rounds into his Labradors. He thought he was being invaded. If he’d had a gun in his home for self protection, he’d almost certainly be dead. That the danger in Calvo’s instance came from incompetent cops instead of thuggish drug dealrs wouldn’t have made him any less dead. The utter tone-deafness of this line from Schweinsburg is appalling. How dare this mayor question the cops who nearly killed him. It suggests that all cops, no matter what they do, should be immune from public scrutiny. It’s similar to a letter in response to Calvo’s case from a Milwaukee cop that we saw in National Review a while back. No empathy whatsoever. You get the feeling they believe Calvo ought to thank the Prince George’s deputies for having the courtesy not to kill him.

Of course, when it comes to SWAT, any amount of violence is OK because it’s the “law” doing it, whereas something like having a little marijuana is considered “dangerous.”

In this case that Radley talked about last week, a SWAT team descended on a home, stormed it with guns, fired seven rounds at the family’s dogs as a seven-year old looked on, found a small amount of marijuana, and charged the parents with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

It’s bad enough that SWAT seems to think they always have to shoot the dog.

I worked a job for a while that involved going house to house, often cutting across lawns and stumbling into the mean dog on a 20 foot chain right by the side of the house 2 feet away from me. I didn’t have a gun to shoot them, so I learned how to deal with them. There are specific, effective techniques (even if your police department can’t afford a tranq gun, because you spent all your money on tanks and black hoods) that can allow you to proceed without shooting the dog or getting bit. I was able to teach these techniques to minimum wage part-time delivery personnel, so I assume the smarter cops would be able to absorb the lesson as well.

As for this cop? … I don’t know.

A police officer trying to make an arrest at a Minneapolis home shot the neighbor’s dog.

The dog’s owners are angry and confused, but police officials say the officer acted responsibly.

William Knapp said his rottweiler/yellow lab mix Wilson was in his fenced yard, located in the 3200 block of Bryant Avenue N, Friday morning as police tried to arrest someone at at house next door.

Knapp said, “I heard my mom yelling, ‘They shot our dog they shot dog.'”

Knapp’s brother Allen said the dog did not try to attack the officer and wasn’t even barking when it was shot.

Neighbors backed up the Knapps’ version of events. But police said the dog was barking viciously and tried to jump the fence toward the officer.

And there was another case of wrong address drug raid, where a man and his father (who was in bed recovering from cancer treatment) found themselves at the point of a gun, forced to the floor and handcuffed. Police had the wrong half of a duplex. Neighbors now say that the police scraped off the “A” on the house number of one side of the duplex after they made the mistake in order to cover it up. Best line in the video is from the victim:

If the mailman can distinguish that this is two addresses, I’m pretty sure the police could, too.

We’ve been having a fabulous conversation about the meaning/validity of the phrase “marijuana addiction” and how that has been and should be addressed.

Danny Chapin, the managing editor of AllTreatment.com, a directory for drug rehab centers and substance abuse information resource, originally approached me about having a dialog about marijuana addiction with all of you, as he searches for understanding himself.

1. Danny Chapin’s original post
2. Pete Guither’s response

If you haven’t had a chance to read those, I recommend that you do so — the comments were extraordinary — and it leads to this one.

Danny Chapin has now responded to my response. Check it out and take your shots. I’ll react later.
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If any of you thought that it should be easy to change the formula of funding for the drug war, this piece will help demonstrate the sad reality.

Remember when the drug policy budget for 2011 came out? Despite constant messages from the White House and the Drug Czar that the emphasis needs to be on treatment rather than on enforcement, on demand rather than supply, the new budget the unveiled showed increases in every major category of supply-side and enforcement-side drug war with just some shifts within those areas. It’s like they gave in entirely to the lobbying pressures to keep the drug war fully funded even when we’re broke.

And yet, check out the grillinggiven yesterday to the Drug Czar in the House:

At a March 3 hearing of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) asked, “Were you consulted, Mr. Kerlikowske, or anyone else here, when the administration proposed to cut the Coast Guard positions by 1,100, to mothball five recently upgraded helicopters, reducing the Coast Guard’s anti-drug operations in Florida, where I just happen to live, and the Caribbean – which we just cited was the main source of these people putting this crap in – that would dramatically reduce our nation’s capability? Were you consulted on these cuts?” Mica asked.

“No,” Kerlikowske said. […]

“Actually, both sides of the aisle were just stunned at the administration’s proposal,” Mica said of the proposed cuts. […]

“The Coast Guard is also stretched thin – responsible for carrying out a range of missions, from port security to disaster response, drug smuggling interdiction, and the protection of our maritime resources,” Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said at the Feb. 24 hearing where Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified about the budget.

I hate to be right, but, in my initial post on the budget, I said:

Because there are so many entrenched interests in law enforcement, well organized interests with lobbyists and guns, that nothing can ever be cut. The only question when this bill reaches Congress is how much they try to increase the law enforcement/supply side numbers.

Yep.

… says absolutely nothing.

Inroads made in drug war, panel told

The last two decades have seen a strengthening global resolve to address the issue of drug production, trafficking and use, Kerlikowske testified during a hearing of the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

What does that mean?

Time to clean out the deadwood and eliminate the ONDCP.

Here’s an outstanding news piece covering the situation with Constable David Bratzer reported here yesterday.

The coverage is a real breath of fresh air.

Link

GUATEMALA CITY – Authorities arrested Guatemala’s anti-drug czar and national police chief Tuesday in a case involving stolen cocaine and slain police, acting just two days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives to discuss the drug war.

Oops.

The Victoria BC Police Department, an organization that should be known for its bravery, exhibited a rather extreme act of cowardice recently.

David Bratzer, who volunteers with the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) while off-duty, has been ordered not to speak at an official City of Victoria-sponsored event on harm reduction scheduled for this Wednesday, March 3 at 7:00 P.M.

Even though the event is scheduled outside of his regular work hours, management from the Victoria Police Department, without Bratzer’s knowledge, informed city staff that he was being withdrawn from speaking. Then on February 24, a senior officer at the department directly ordered Bratzer not to participate in the event.

In response to these developments, Bratzer stated: “I will not be attending this event, but I would like to thank the City of Victoria for the invitation to be part of an honest and open discussion about harm reduction. I will try to find other venues to present my views about drug policy.”

Upon learning of the department’s order, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association filed a complaint with the Victoria Police Board.

Bratzer has always taken pains to state that his opinions are his own and do not reflect the views of his employer. He has participated in a number of credible venues related to drug policy during the past year, including delivering testimony to the Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs in Ottawa (video available from LEAP).

“The voices of front-line officers who are charged with enforcing the drug laws are incredibly important to the public debate on drug policy issues,” said Jack Cole, a retired American undercover narcotics detective who serves as executive director for LEAP. “Preventing an officer from sharing his firsthand perspective about the harms of our current drug laws with policymakers is a disservice to the entire democratic process.”

Action Alert: LEAP has a petition to show your support for cops like David.

Here is the BC Civil Liberties Association press release:

The BCCLA is concerned that the Victoria Police Department is taking an unduly punitive and anti-free speech position without justification. […] Where an off-duty communication by a member is a critique or endorsement of government or department policy, and it is not stated or implied in that communication that the member is unable or unwilling to enforce the law impartially and according to his or her statutory and professional duties, it is inappropriate for a police department to interfere with that communication.

It’s fear, pure and simple. This action by the Police Department isn’t about policy, or about protecting the reputation of the department. It’s about fearing the message. Period.

We’re a scary bunch. ‘Cause we bring facts that upset the apple cart.

We’ve talked so many times here about the death of the Fourth Amendment, particularly in the war on drugs. It has been trashed over and over again from every direction.

We haven’t talked much about “plain view.” Plain view is the notion that if an officer sees something illegal sitting out in plain view, it’s perfectly OK for him to charge you with it. So, if you’ve been robbed and you invite a police officer into your home to show him that your piggy bank was broken open, and there are twelve severed heads on the counter, the officer isn’t required to ignore them — they are in plain view and now you’re going to be charged with some heinous crime.

However, that’s not how plain view normally works. Officers work hard to get themselves into position where they can see as much as possible in an attempt to go fishing.

Terry v. Ohio, followed by Michigan v. Long, allowed police to pat people down, and even do a routine search of a car in certain situations for the safety of the officer to insure that there are no weapons present. (I wonder how often people detained by officers are able to dive back into their car and grab a weapon.) Of course, if they find drugs, well, that just happened to be in plain view, while they were searching for tiny guns which might be hidden inside film canisters [is that a dated reference?].

If you open the door to your house when police knock and they see something illegal through the open door (or through your window), they can act.

Just this past month, the 9th Circuit made a particularly bad ruling in United States v. Lemus, holding that when police arrested a man outside his house, the police had the authority to sweep inside the house to make sure there was nothing there to endanger them!

Thanks to Fourth Amendment.com, we give you the powerful words in dissent of Chief Judge Kozinski…
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